Swift's A Modest Proposal

In “A Modest Proposal,” Jonathan Swift is writing about the problems in Ireland in the late 1600s and early 1700s. When Swift says, “……when they see the streets, the roads and cabin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in strolling, to beg sustenance for their helpless infants….,” he is explaining what you see when you were in Ireland at that time. The English had taken all of the land, and left almost nothing for the Irish. They were then had to beg for food for them and ...

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to the English. If the Irish nurse their children until they are one year old, they will be plump enough for the English to use as food. They can also use their skin to make leather that the men can make into boots, and the women can make into gloves. This way no parts of the children will go to waste. Since the English thought of the Irish as animals, they could treat them as they would treat animals. The ideas of the persona solves all of the problems mentioned before. The English will get food, and the Irish will have a way of making money.
What Swift is really trying to suggest to the Irish people is that they take matters into their own hands and fight back to make things better for themselves. He mentioned that one thing the Irish could do is to tax the absentee landlords by keeping a small portion of the food they grow and send over to pay the landlords that stole their land. This way they will build up a little extra food to feed them and their family. Another suggestion he ...

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